Comment by Anna Hall on February 3, 2010 at 2:24am

I agree with Lois: the latest suggestion by Lynn (dated Jan 28) seems like it would let us accomplish what we are trying to do. For the sake of clarity (for those who are 'searching around Merlot'), perhaps we could rephrase/ retitle the following:
- "Foundations of Society -- Social Structure, Social Interaction, Social Order"- may be INSTEAD of having "Social order" here, we could put "formal organizations"? (otherwise, they seem to be entirely missing).
- "Deviance/Social Control"- can we add "crime" here as well?
The two large categories that I see us having to break down further (at some point later? or now?) are "Institutions" and "Inequalities" (again, from the 'searcher's' point of view... if I want to quickly find some material on "Education", I'm not sure I want to scan through all the other institutions).
Here is another question: do we put/ explicitly list "Mass Media" in any of the category headings? (if I was searching, with the current suggested listing, I wouldn't be sure where to look... Under "Control" or "Institutions"? :)).
My general impression is that, out of the proposed 9 listings, #3, #5, #6 are a bit too broad while #7, #8, #9 are almost chapter-specific. Can the last 3 be collapsed further ("Global social problems and Social change"..)? And the middle ones broken down a bit more narrow?
The ASA... I haven't seen any other discipline in Merlot going this detailed....
Just my two cents..
Anna

Comment by Lynn Ritchey on February 3, 2010 at 1:14pm

Could we have subcategories under the general headings? In the list of 9, we could have a "catch all" for items we don't think fit the 9 categories. For example, there are some web resources that offer links to a variety of sociological topics -- SocioWeb.

Comment by Aaron Flint on February 5, 2010 at 6:06am

I think that Lynn's list (Jan 28) is a good start. Having 10 or less categories to start will make things more manageable. As the Sociology collection grows so too could the categories.

Comment by Anna Hall on February 5, 2010 at 8:25am

Could we keep the 9 categories, but "expand" their titles to make more clear what we decided to include into each category? For example, could we call it "Institutions: Family, Education, Religion, Economy, Politics"?

Comment by Lynn Ritchey on February 8, 2010 at 11:53am

Are we still teleconferencing tomorrow?

Comment by Lois Easterday on February 18, 2010 at 12:48pm

In trying to put some of the sites into the framework, it appears like we might need a Culture category. I have been putting those into the Foundations category, but they might not be correctly placed.

Comment by Anna Hall on February 22, 2010 at 12:24pm

Lois, I was having the same trouble with a few of mine. I'm not sure we should keep the ones that are clearly "Anthropology" or "History/ Genealogy" (these are the types I had..) as "ours". My concern is (at least, based on the ones I reviewed): they are describing personal histories/ cultures... but are they taking a sociological approach? If not- wouldn't we be better off removing them? Just a question...
Anna

Comment by Cathy Swift on February 22, 2010 at 1:11pm

I'm going to answer one of the questions asked by someone on the Taskforce here, so that all can benefit from it. what IS the "General" subcategory? Is this a catch-all for things we don't know where it fits? Or... is this a subcategory for the very BROAD/ all-encompassing materials, like the ones I mentioned above?

Actually the answer is both, because it is up to the Taskforce to decide what that category is for. In Business, we use it to denote something that crosses all categories of business. Many campuses have an Introduction to Business course, which isn't really disicpline specific (i.e. it may include Accounting, Marketing, Management, etc.). It doesn't pertain to any specific one of the sub-categories in Business. It doesn't necessarily mean that it has a LOT of resources there, but it can be used in general business classes as well as any others. This is certainly something we should bring up on the conference call.

Comment by Cathy Swift on February 22, 2010 at 1:16pm

Another comment with an answer: 3 of the sites assigned to me encompass every single category in Sociology (essentially, what they have withIN them is what we are trying to set up under "Merlot" itself)... Other than classifying them under "General", I am not sure how we could list them.

If you have a site that can be broken down into smaller segments, we really prefer that we do so. For instance, if you have a Sociology course that covers all of the topics we have talked about, it is better for you to create catalogs of the individual sites, i.e. Institutions, Deviances, etc. That way, when someone is Browsing the materials, it is easier for them to find. Our goal is to provide high quality, easily accessible materials for faculty. If we break down the mega-sites into separate ones, faculty can find them more easily. Also, thinking ahead to peer review, would you really want to have to peer review some of the mega-sites? Quite a task. Again, we can talk on the conference call.

Comment by Anna Hall on February 22, 2010 at 2:33pm

Cathy, are you saying that we (as the Task Force) can actually break-up/ modify/edit the materials already posted by someone on Merlot- to fit our organizational needs? How could that be done- unless we ask the authors themselves to resubmit the material in a more "specific/ separate-by-topic" format?
Do I want to review a mega site? No.... But... I've been assigned one such site in psychology- and having a major problem doing it! :)

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